Novels in Three Lines (New York Review Books Classics)
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A NEW YORK REVIEW BOOKS ORIGINAL
Novels in Three Lines collects more than a thousand items that appeared anonymously in the French newspaper Le Matin in 1906—true stories of murder, mayhem, and everyday life presented with a ruthless economy that provokes laughter even as it shocks. This extraordinary trove, undiscovered until the 1940s and here translated for the first time into English, is the work of the mysterious Félix Fénéon. Dandy, anarchist, and critic of genius, the discoverer of Georges Seurat and the first French publisher of James Joyce, Fénéon carefully maintained his own anonymity, toiling for years as an obscure clerk in the French War Department. Novels in Three Lines is his secret chef-d’oeuvre, a work of strange and singular art that brings back the long-ago year of 1906 with the haunting immediacy of a photograph while looking forward to such disparate works as Walter Benjamin’s Arcades Project and the Death and Disaster series of Andy Warhol.
Novels in Three Lines collects more than a thousand items that appeared anonymously in the French newspaper Le Matin in 1906—true stories of murder, mayhem, and everyday life presented with a ruthless economy that provokes laughter even as it shocks. This extraordinary trove, undiscovered until the 1940s and here translated for the first time into English, is the work of the mysterious Félix Fénéon. Dandy, anarchist, and critic of genius, the discoverer of Georges Seurat and the first French publisher of James Joyce, Fénéon carefully maintained his own anonymity, toiling for years as an obscure clerk in the French War Department. Novels in Three Lines is his secret chef-d’oeuvre, a work of strange and singular art that brings back the long-ago year of 1906 with the haunting immediacy of a photograph while looking forward to such disparate works as Walter Benjamin’s Arcades Project and the Death and Disaster series of Andy Warhol.
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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase
Felix Feneon (1861-1944) seems to have had quite a colourful life. He was, at various times, a clerk, an art critic and dealer, an accused (and acquitted) terrorist conspirator, a journalist, a publisher, a translator and a writer.
This collection of very small stories, all from his journalistic work in 1906, are, literally, three lines long apiece, and are intriguing, entertaining and often horrifying all at once. Many of the stories are about crime and violence, and it's amazing just how many murders, fires, thefts and incidents of GBH were happening all around him in the cities and towns and rural France. It's difficult to keep in mind all the way through that they are all factual, because the brevity and colourful content makes them read like demonic poetry.
I've never read anything else like it. The NYRB edition is an excellent, high quality paperback with a substantial introduction and biography of Feneon, as well as a fetching photographic portrait of him as a dandy in a top hat.
This collection of very small stories, all from his journalistic work in 1906, are, literally, three lines long apiece, and are intriguing, entertaining and often horrifying all at once. Many of the stories are about crime and violence, and it's amazing just how many murders, fires, thefts and incidents of GBH were happening all around him in the cities and towns and rural France. It's difficult to keep in mind all the way through that they are all factual, because the brevity and colourful content makes them read like demonic poetry.
I've never read anything else like it. The NYRB edition is an excellent, high quality paperback with a substantial introduction and biography of Feneon, as well as a fetching photographic portrait of him as a dandy in a top hat.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
This works by reminding us of the service brevity can render to writing. These are beautifully translated stories containing great human dramas within the literary equivalent of a miniature painting. A perfect stuffer of stockings.
Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase
The reader, failing to spot Julian Barnes' over-ripe praise, slipped through the book in error and discomfort... This is a collection of over a thousand 'faits-divers' or newspaper fillers that the French dandy Felix Feneon (1861-1944) was paid to assemble from local papers for the amusement of the metropolitan readers of 'Le Matin'. It was actually his sonorous mistress, Camille Plateel, who collated them and deserves the credit for leaving the legacy of this snapshot album of France in 1906. It's diverting enough: a catalogue of hit-and-run deaths (then a novelty), suicides, accidents (especially small children), jealous lovers (especially those partial to projecting acid), thefts (telegraph cables are an obsession), sexual abuse (incest and geriatric rape score highly) and small-p politics (dock strikes, religious education, military incidents). The relaxed journalistic protocols of the time enabled Feneon to indulge his literary streak and these incidents are related in a clause-riddled, author-enhancing manner that often obscures the incidents described. Translator Luc Sante might have won awards and write for the New York Review, but I reckon he struggles - as many French (or Belgian) speakers do - with the gerund. Sante certainly apes Feneon's pretentiousness with approval. The title 'Nouvelles en trois lignes' should more properly have been translated as 'the news in three lines' - or, at the very least, 'stories in three lines'. They ain't 'romains'. Sante's introduction is similarly starstruck by Feneon's intellectually indulgent life but has its merits notwithstanding; while the book is satisfyingly peppered with grim, contemporary images of crime scenes and low-life activities.
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